“ The Singapore Summit has been very positive and very good for me. You have made a good choice of topics, and the speakers were all very impressive. The audience is also very diverse, which creates a very different atmosphere that gives us opportunities to mingle with people from other countries. ”Osamu Nagayama, Chairman & CEO, Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd

“ I have continued to be impressed with the global reach of Singapore and the ability for Singapore to attract global leaders and CEOs from all sorts of industries, and the very concise, compact, and thoughtful sessions. The Singapore Summit has been absolutely outstanding. ”Gerald Hassell, Chairman & CEO, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation

“ The Singapore Summit is an excellent opportunity to bring together a lot of people from around the world, who have a real, deep interest in Asia. People are more open here than in some other events around the world. There is a level of trust here, and there is great diversity of people from all over the world – I always feel like I learn a lot at this event. ”Sir Andrew Witty, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)

“ Overall, the experience [at the Singapore Summit] was fantastic. Everything moved, as always, in perfect style, whether it was the choice of topics, the content, the quality of the discussions, the timing, and the networking. That is why it is a great experience. ”- Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank Limited

Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Tharman is Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies. He is in addition Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore's central bank and financial regulator.

Tharman also leads the 'SkillsFuture' national programme, which seeks to build the skills of the future, and empower Singaporeans to learn throughout life.

He was appointed by his international peers as Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the key policy forum of the IMF, for an extended period of four years from March 2011, and was its first Asian chair. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty, an independent global council of leading economic policy-makers, finance leaders and academics.

Tharman has spent his career in public service, in roles mainly around economic policy and education. He served as Minister for Finance for eight years (until September 2015), and was Minister for Education for five years.

Nik Gowing

International Broadcaster

Nik Gowing was a main news presenter for the BBC's international 24-hour news channel BBC World News 1996-2014. He presented The Hub with Nik Gowing, BBC World Debates, Dateline London, plus location coverage of major global stories.

For 18 years he worked at ITN where he was bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw, and Diplomatic Editor for Channel Four News (1988-1996). He has been a member of the councils of Chatham House (1998-2004), the Royal United Services Institute (2005-present), and the Overseas Development Institute (2007-2014), the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy including vice chair (1996-2005), and the advisory council at Wilton Park (1998-2012). In 1994 he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center in the J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a board member for the Hay Festival.

Nik has extensive reporting experience over three decades in diplomacy, defence and international security. He also has a much sought-after analytical expertise on the failures to manage information in the new transparent environments of conflicts, crises, emergencies and times of tension. His peer-reviewed study at Oxford University is "Skyful of Lies and Black Swans". It predicts and identifies the new vulnerability, fragility and brittleness of institutional power in the new all-pervasive public information space. It can be downloaded free online after registration. The work follows an earlier study undertaken at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

In 2016 he co-authored interim findings of the "Thinking the Unthinkable" study. It is based on sixty top level confidential interviews of corporate and public service leaders, plus the new generation of millennials. The study is in partnership with CIMA. It reveals candidly the factors that explain why so many leaders face new difficulties identifying what looms in the disruptions of the "new normal" that have emerged since 2013. The findings are scary.

In 2014 Nik was appointed a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London in the School of Social Science and Public Policy. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Geo-Economics.

He was awarded Honorary Doctorates by Exeter University in 2012 and Bristol University in 2015 for both his ongoing cutting edge analyses and distinguished career in international journalism.